Tom Piazza Quotes & Sayings

A portrait of the young Charlie Parker with a degree of vivid detail never before approached ... [Kansas City Lightning is] a deft, virtuosic panorama of early jazz ... This is a mind-opening, and mind-filling, book. — Tom Piazza

And they went off down the street, into the heart of Mardi Gras Day. — Tom Piazza

The past in New Orleans cohabits with the present to an extent not even approximated in any other North American city. — Tom Piazza

New Orleans is a city of elegance, beauty, and refinement. — Tom Piazza

And you form a map in your heart of all the places that make you so happy, — Tom Piazza

The traveling world is parallel to the world of those rooted to one spot; it is the other end of the telescope, so to speak. Things that are taken by most people to have solidity and permanence become relative and subject to time. The church spire, the town hall or courthouse that watches over your days and is an ever-fixed mark to the merchant or the laborer, is to the traveling man only one among many such. The cherished touchstones of your daily life are to him a set of fresh opportunities for passing adventure, a source of profit to be extracted quickly, like gold from a small mountain, before moving on to the next El Dorado. — Tom Piazza

Their Big Chief, Bo Dollis, would marshal them all together and they would start off down Dryades, with Chief Bo chanting one of the Indian songs accompanied by drums and tambourines, and the whole gang shouting back the antiphonal response. — Tom Piazza

she was practicing a skill that both her parents had acquired as children, a way of maintaining a substitute life — Tom Piazza

And so they couldn't have known exactly how despicable a lie it was when the president told the news media later that week that nobody could have predicted the levee breaks. — Tom Piazza

New Orleanians knew how to turn deprivation into an asset; they had the best gallows humor going, they danced at funerals, they insisted on prevailing. — Tom Piazza

Go with what is. Use what happens. — Tom Piazza

She had arrived in dirty rags and had cooked up a striking outfit for herself, out of relief donations, — Tom Piazza

In New Orleans, on the other hand, geography and time, food, music, holidays, modes of dress and ways of speaking, are part of an integrated fabric. People dress in certain ways for certain events, and certain foods are eaten on certain days, — Tom Piazza

At one point, early on, some public figures even asked whether it 'made sense' to rebuild New Orleans. Would you let your own mother die because it didn't make financial sense to spend the money to treat her, or because you were too busy to spend the time to heal her sick spirit? — Tom Piazza

In New Orleans the funerals remind us that Life is bigger than any individual life, and it will roll on, and for the short time that your individual life joins the big stream of Life, cut some decent steps, for God's sake. — Tom Piazza